The first of eight weeks of class is now over and I thought I'd write quickly about my fellow students. There's not a great deal to say about them as a group, as it's not easy to characterize so diverse a student body. I can that they're nearly all very young - particularly a pack of semester-abroad students from the UK who, based on my admittedly unscientific "acne dating" technique, can't be any older than sixteen. There are a few students my age, but not many. Yesterday we practiced numbers by giving the year of our birth. Other than the instructor, I was the only person in the room to give a date before 1980. That I would be sharing a classroom with someone born in the year 2000 makes me a little sick, and not only because alfeen is so much easier to say than alf-tus9umeiyya-taminniyya-wee-sab9een.
The Americans here are a very diverse group - from aid workers to missionaries to college students to a bunch of military types. As is usually the case given our schizophrenic culture, the most obnoxious and the most likable people in the program are American. I've also noticed that you'll only ever find Americans wearing the keffiyeh and that there appears to be an inverse correlation between feeling the need to parade around in a keffiyeh and the ability to successfully learn the Arabic language. I have a few theories as to why that is, but am waiting on a few more data points to come in before I release anything.
I'm surprised by the lack of New Zealanders and Australians. In most travel scenarios, you can't find a ten-bed mixed hostel without them, but I haven't seen a single one in three months. I imagine it's a combination of expense and practicality - relative to Chinese or Indonesian, there's probably just not that much emphasis placed on Arabic, and I don't suppose you're likely to make the sort of investment necessary to acquire a language like Arabic without some sort of return. This doesn't mean that my apartment is completely without kiwi charm, however. The school has inexplicably decorated my walls with pictures of New Zealand's south island. When the chaos outside seems like too much, I can turn to shots of Lake Wakatipu and the Franz Josef glacier and dream of world without either cars or their horns. I see Ms. Chadha's hand in this.
The rest of the student body is your usual mix of Europeans, with an especially good showing from the Norweigans and Swedes, really far more than makes sense unless it has something to do with escaping their miserable weather? I'd like to ask one of them to explain to me the relationship between Scandinavians and chewing Tobacco. In almost everything that really matters, like healthcare, education, and blonde hair, the Scandinavians lead the world, but I've met a fair number of Swedish and Norwegian snus junkies over the years. I can't say that I know anyone at home who touches the stuff.
Speaking of nicotine addictions, one of the guys I know here has been trying to quit smoking (in Egypt? really?). He tells me he went to the local pharmacy to ask for a nicotine patch. The pharmacist literally had no concept of what he was asking for. He just couldn't comprehend why anyone would want or need to receive nicotine through a patch - "why don't you just smoke cigarettes?" he asks. My advice to the student was that he forget the nicotine and instead get hooked on the over-the-counter muscle relaxants that are so widely available here. These including a choice between rest-of-the-world Valium and, terrifyingly, something called "Egyptian Valium." I think I'll limit my pharmaceutical intake to benadryl and DEET.
So there we are. I'm taking leave of my fellow students tomorrow and heading up to Alexandria for the weekend - or I guess I should say "down" to Alexandria. Relative direction isn't measured here in terms of north or south, but by the direction of the Nile's flow, so I guess I'm actually "going down north." I really don't have a plan as to what I'll do, where I'll stay or for how long, but I'm looking forward to it.
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